tinker tailor soldier spy
by Nyias
Summary: Each Marauder has his own talent.


All copyrights belong to J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury; title courtesy of a John LeCarré novel and probably something else as well. I first published this at my LiveJournal in June 2004.

tinker tailor soldier spy

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i. tinker_

Sirius is a tinker, one who uses his tools with intent and finesse. Recently he's been tinkering with his motorbike (a gift to himself after completing school without failing _anything_), making it hum on half the diesel the owner's manual claims it needs with one turn of a wrench, and charming it to fly with a flick and swish of his wand.

Sirius will tinker with anything until its function is streamlined, removing unnecessary elements and manipulating the essential ones so the machine runs smoothly, without interruption.

But Sirius's tools are not only found in his metal box, and he tinkers with other things too. Engines are not the only things to be streamlined, he believes, but also bodies and grocery runs and friendships, all of which can only be improved by a very different sort of tinkering. The tools he's developed to accomplish these tasks are not tangible metal that weigh in his hand, but they still require the same careful steady manipulation to function. These are the skills he is still honing at twenty, and when Remus comes into the garage to ask about the groceries, Sirius rolls out from beneath his motorbike, flat on his back, with a stripe of oil across his cheek.

_  
ii. tailor_

Remus can tailor anything to fit anyone, anytime. Given enough notice, he can even tailor clothes-- a skill he acquired while forced to wear garments from a thrift shop in Diagon Alley. Really, though, Remus is best at tailoring lies to fit awkward situations, something he's practiced since he was a little boy. He's become good at it, and now must provide plausible excuses and alibis for those caught where and when they oughtn't be. More than this, he needs to develop these lies before the various predicaments arise, and teach them to the soldiers in the field with efficiency and care.

No story too sparse; no story too valiant. Sometimes, in war, implausible (though not impossible) is better, as long as the enemy spends enough time puzzling out the tale for the storytellers to do their duties. If the soldiers are lucky, the enemy spends enough time pondering for them to do their duties and get out again. Remus stitches his stories together so that the soldiers can escape. Somebody ought to give the boy a medal on a ribbon.

But they don't. Remus is viewed as frilly haute-couture for an outnumbered, demoralised group of fighters, someone who sews his threads tightly and spins yarns like nobody else, ensuring that nothing gets tangled in knots but spending too much time on the intricacies and textures of the strands rather than on the tapestry. But Remus is aware that his is expert stitching, and doesn't care that he's made the type of earth-toned artwork that most would rather not hang on a wall. These are the best kind of stories; the ones that remain uninspected, passed over and ignored. These are the kind he has spun for his friends and enemies for most of his life, and these are the ones that work. So when James comes to him early one morning and asks for a cover story, Remus reclaims all the swatches he's ever given him and weaves them into a bulletproof vest.

_  
iii. soldier_

James is the quintessential soldier. His knowledge is not of machines or of stories but rather of those few things that a soldier needs to know, like how to take a punch and when to duck. He does not strive to complete wonderful acts but instead does very well within the rut he has dug for himself, taking orders without question and then executing them with precision. He is oblivious to many things, like his newly pregnant wife, who sits in the window and hopes he comes home. He does not think of such things, of course, or of people, because he is still playing war games like the ones he and his friends played at school.

There, the most dreadful thing that ever happened was that he slipped in the mud and fell flat on his face in front of Lily. But she married him anyway, so it didn't matter.

So James is a good soldier. He knows everything he needs to know, nothing more; is obedient and a decent liar. Unfortunately, James is also accustomed to taking orders, a skill he acquired during his stint as Head Boy, so when Sirius suggests they switch Secret-Keepers to Peter, James doesn't realize that this is not a command, and that he has no obligation to consent.

_  
iv. spy_

Peter spies. He's good at it, but then again there's not that much to be good at. Like Poe's Purloined Letter, he hides in plain sight, using his utter forgettable appearance to his advantage.   
No longer is he gullible enough to believe everything everyone says. This he learned at school, from his friends the practical-jokers, along with other essential spy skills, like how to sneak around and how to make people like him.

Sometimes he wonders whether it was worth it, to become a spy, because the job holds less intrigue than those Muggle James Bond films seem to show, and the excitement mainly consists of reading the paper in the morning, seated in his kitchen chair, and discovering that some of his collected intelligence has altered the assumptions of the magical world forever. He is not one of the warriors in the field, creating and proclaiming these changes, but rather he facilitates them by knowing the right people and spreading the facts and the half-truths and the lies both ways, among the leaders who need to know the news before it happens.

So yes, sometimes Peter wonders whether he ought to have chosen another profession. But his few abilities are so easily applied to the one he's already in that it seems a waste to even consider all the what-ifs and the maybes.

If Peter had possessed different abilities and had acquired different skills, things would have been different. For starters, he would have never accepted Severus Snape's whispered offer to finish his Potions homework in exchange for a small favour to be determined at a later time. 


End file.
